Welcome back to the Pibytes podcast. Career progress is often not linear, and in this episode, we share our how did we get into programming? How did we get into Python, and what did it take to become a successful pythonista? We took this from a guest lecture we recently did for one of the universities in the US. Maybe you're new to Pibytes, then this is an introduction who we are. But if you're not, then feel free to skip it or maybe listen to it if you want to get some inspiration. Again, career progress is not linear, and we did not get a CS degree to be successful using Python. Enjoy and hit us up on our slack if you have any feedback. Hello, and welcome to the Pibytes podcast, where we talk about Python career and mindset. We're your hosts. I'm Julian Sequeira. And I am Bob Valdebos. If you're looking to improve your python, your career, and learn the mindset for success, this is the podcast for you. Let's get started. All right, so our career stories. Now, we wanted to share our stories in a bit of detail because we feel that it can really help people get some inspiration and some motivation to push to use python in their career. And the reason I say that is because neither Bob or I have a traditional journey into a coding job. Most people go to a degree at uni, much like many of you perhaps, and then you get a job. But what Bob and I want to demonstrate is that the passion for Python can really take you places. So to start me off, Bob, I'm going to go first. You can wait. What I started off my career with doing was serve, as I hinted before, server maintenance. So I was working for Sun Microsystems, which is where I met Bob, is where our friendship began. And, you know, I was looking after a test data center full of machines, and eventually, you know, that's where I met Bob. But then Oracle bought us out and we both transitioned over to Oracle. And then I eventually continued that job until I moved into a field service role. So again, there's this trend of troubleshooting that I was doing. I was very good with finding and pinpointing problems, using this, if this, then that sort of mentality to find problems and find solutions. And the field engineer role did that for a few years. Lots of experience with servers on customer sites, SLA's, and all sorts of issues that customers might have. Really great experience. Eventually, however, I got tired of that, and an opportunity to work for Amazon Web Services came up. So I now work for AWS. And again, I was working in the data center for a couple of years now. This is where Python took over, and this is why I told you that story, because for almost ten years, I was server stuff. I was hardware, I was physical, I was on site, I wasn't coding. And then in 2016, when Bob and I started to learn to code, I also started to try and find ways in my job in the Amazon data center, in the AWS data center, ways to use Python. And this was that key thing that changed my career for me, because I was looking to automate even the most simplistic of things, you know. Yeah, there were some, some joke scripts that I wrote with the team, that's fine, but there were some serious ones, obviously, to automate, you know, I can't talk about it really, but to automate some things that were happening in the data centers. And it was actually building a specific app for a team that changed my career. So a team mentioned they had a problem, I spoke to them about it and I said, oh yeah, python can do that. Just had to do with some web scraping, I can say that much. And by building this for them in my spare time, so, mind you, I had the day job to do and I did this in my spare time. I built this app for them, and most importantly, I presented it to them. I didn't just email them and say, here's how to use it. I got them in a meeting room and I presented it. That's the key part, because by building up those presentation skills, by talking about my application, about my python in person, I was really able to communicate the Python code to these non coders. And that is what landed me my first Python job. Because after that meeting, someone said to me, I think I might have a position that you'd be interested in. Sure enough, a couple of months later, the position came up. They told me about it, I applied, and because at this point, I had PI bytes. Now Python business, I had that app, and I had already had some credibility in the company of using Python to automate our services and the things that we did, the tasks. Then I was allowed to, you know, apply for that job and I actually, obviously not allowed anyone can apply for the job, but I was able to get through that coding interview and land the job. And that changed my career, because then I was no longer physical on site, I was then remote. I was a remote worker and I was using Python to develop. And I was very fortunate that instead of supporting an existing product, which is what I thought I would be doing, they gave me free rein to build. They said, we don't want you in a support role, we want you to just be creative. So I was able to utilize things like all sorts of script level server side automation, using libraries like your date time modules and so on. But I was also doing things with Flask, and that one was amazing because then I was using Flask, and I was also integrating that Python code with AWS services like SQS and SNS. And I built this amazing tool I was very proud of, very happy about, and it then opened up more doors. So you can see how using Python and building things and actively creating stuff, that's what sort of opened the doors for me in my career. It wasn't just necessarily being able to prove that I could code by answering some questions in an interview. It was having that tangible item that I built. And then the careers changed from there and still uses Python a bit, but I've moved into some global type project management roles. So, yeah, so that's my story and how Python changed my career. And I apologize. That probably took a few minutes, but if you're still awake, it's your turn, Bob. Go for it. No, I love that story because it shows that you really took a bottom to top approach. You didn't, you were not going to learn all the skills up front, see if something sticks. You really went from something very small and building it up. And the cool thing about building stuff is that it accumulates, so. And also, I think the communication and networking skills are very apparent in your story. Yeah. Not only the technical side. That's a good point you make, though, that I'll quickly call out is the python code that I did have to learn. I didn't know it before I coded in it. It was literally having to code those projects that made me sit there and go, okay, I've got to learn. It could learn how to create these databases and build this app, you know. So learning as I went was my greatest skill, I guess. Not bulk learning everything in advance, thinking I have to know everything about everything. So, yeah, failure, way to success, fake it to you, make it. All right, you go, Bob, your turn. Yeah. All right, cool. So my story actually starts by getting bored in my own country, Holland, and venturing out to another place, to Spain, where I settled 16 years ago. So that kind of influenced my career trajectory, because landing in another country, I had to find work. So I settled for role in support, which is kind of counterintuitive coming from finance, but in hindsight, the troubleshooting skills I learned on that job because I, from day one, I was put in front of a Unix terminal, which I hated. I mean, you don't want to watch me use Vim those first days. It's embarrassing. But the Unix skills and the troubleshooting really set me up for that whole career in it. And as I went, I discovered this passion of automating things, tool building. And I just started doing that on the side, just seeing what my colleagues or team was struggling with and try to build tools to make their life easier. And over time, in some microsystems where we met, well, virtually in the distance, that's actually how we met, because I was building a tool and I was booking all the, the lab systems time Julian was policing. So he tapped me on my fingers, like what you're doing, that's how we met. So that's funny, but yeah, so that automation, sun, and later Oracle picked up on that and gave me more responsibilities from tool development to automation development. So instead of building reports, now I was in charge of automating server vault service tickets, help desk tickets, end to end. So to really save the business a lot of cost. And I was doing that with shell scripting and web PHP and later Perl, and that became mass. So in 2012, I told my boss, like, we can move forward and have a hard to maintain solution, or give me one or two months and I rewrite the whole thing in Python and we probably can move forward way faster. It's a bit like the tortoise in the hare story, like, let's go with tortoise for a longer term success. And yeah, so I chose Python after looking around and since then I never looked back. The solution became more maintainable and could organize my code better. And yeah, I fell in love with Python. That was in 2012. And I just kept dabbling with Python and taking on more projects. In 2016, we started pivytes. And actually the year after, in 2017, I switched teams. So from being an expert in the support organization to be a junior developer among a humongous team of professional senior developers, and I was completely new again, and that did me very well. For my skills, I had to step up my game. But then I really learned the inside out of python, and that prepared me to become a python coach, as I'm doing these days with py bytes. That's kind of my story. That's cool. The thing I'll mention there, Bob, for everyone watching this, is the dumping yourself in the deep end with that career change at Oracle when you moved from that job to the junior role, not many people have the guts to pull that sort of thing off. You know, that's a really high stress situation and potentially risky. But, you know, you knew. I think the key here is that you knew that you had to push yourself, that you had to jump in, you had to do it. You weren't going to find success if you didn't, so. And nobody is coming to you. Right. You have to proactively reach out and. And see what's out there. Yeah, exactly. So just. Just remind me, what do you do full time now? Pie bytes. Yeah, so that's the cool thing. Python has changed your life completely, right? You now work 100% on your own Python business, which is amazing. All right, so there's our stories, and hopefully you all found that just a teeny bit inspiring to get out there and use some python. We hope you enjoyed this episode. To hear more from us, go to Pibyte Friends, that is Pybit es friends, and receive a free gift just for being a friend of the show and to join our thriving slack community of Python programmers, go to Pibytes community. That's pibit es forward slash community. We hope to see you there and catch you in the next episode.